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Facebook & Bing Partner On People Search Engine

The Facebook social network and Bing search engine have announced that they will partner on a new people search tool.

Facebook’s “instant personalization” data will be used to power new people search results on the Bing search engine.

Using Facebook profile information, Facebook users who search for people on Bing will now see Facebook profiles of people whose names match their search query.

Bing’s new people search results will also display friends’ Likes from the Facebook network.

Facebook recently worked with Bing’s Social search to index public updates from their social network pages and people profiles.

People who are signed into Facebook and who have instant personalization enabled will see an instant personalization notice when searching on Bing.

This notice will let people know that their Bing searches will be personalized with people and friend results.

People will have the option to block instant personalization in their Bing search results by { 1 } removing instant personalization or { 2 } not allowing the Bing people search access to their personal information with Facebook’s privacy options.

When Facebook users do a search on Bing for a person’s name that they are socially connected to directly or through a friend, they’ll see Bing search results for the person by name, pictures from a “People on Facebook” module.

People search results on Bing will also show buttons that allow for the sending of a Facebook message to that person or send a friend request to the person if they are not currently connected on the Facebook social graph.

Searching for people online can be time consuming if the person you are trying to find has a common first or last name.

For instance, how do you do a successful people search for a person with the name “Bob Smith”. It is very difficult.

The Bing / Facebook people search will use your existing social graph of people you are directly or indirectly connected to online to return more accurate people search results.

The new Bing personalization search will also return regular keyword search results based on the likes of your Facebook social network.

Bing search results will be shown alongside names and profile pictures of your friends who have “Liked” the result listings.

Social recommendations like these will help people find web pages which are more socially relevant to their search.

For example, people will see news stories that were Liked by their Facebook friends as long as they relate the Bing search query.

According to Bing the new personalized people search results will be an ongoing learning process that will be driven by data mining. Bing’s search engine systems will monitor what people click so they can learn whether or not a given search has a social intent.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said this about Bing’s personalized people search results: “Over the next 5 years, we expect almost every industry will be disrupted by someone building a product which is socially integrated.”

Zuckerberg believes that social data can improve search results the same way it has improved online games, picture sharing and events.

Zuckerberg notes that there is a lot of public information about people that can be used to improve search results.

It should also be noted that Facebook is working on a social map search that will in all likelihood be powered by people’s social networking data.